By writing about characters who are morally dubious and unlikable, are you challenging readers to study our own consciences? Do you think about the politics of a book as a whole when writing?

Mostly I was just so bored of people saying they would have liked my first book more if the characters hadn't been so unsympathetic that in this case I decided to make my protagonist a borderline-paedophile borderline-Holocaust denier. These people who want sympathetic characters in their fiction – do they think of themselves as sympathetic characters too? In other words, do they believe that if a novel was written with complete access to their inner lives, a reader would finish that novel feeling nothing but warmth and fondness for them? I mean, maybe most people do think of themselves in those terms, and so it would be totally unfair for me to call them narcissists.

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